©1998 Larry Huntsperger
Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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1/18/98
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Playing It Loose Pt. 1
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Rev. 2:12-17
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Our study of the seven churches
in Revelation chapters 2 and 3
has brought us Church #3,
the Church at Pergamum.
For those of you
who are keeping track of the single phrase titles I have been offering
to each of the sections we move through,
let me back up just one step
and give you the title to the section
we studied last week,
the church at Smyrna.
In fact,
let me give you the titles
from the beginning of chapter 2.
Rev. 2:1-7 was addressed to the church at Ephesus, and our title for that section was:
DOCTRINE IS KING.
You will remember
that was the church in which
the Christians had replaced their love for Christ
for a love for TRUTH,
for ideas,
for doctrinal systems.
Then, last week we looked at
the only church to which Christ
offered no word or correction,
the church at Smyrna.
His comments to Smyrna are found in Rev. 2:8-11,
and we’re going to call that section FAITHFULNESS.
Now, this morning we are going to move on to the third church,
the church at Pergamum,
and we’ll call this section from Rev. 2:12-17 PLAYING IT LOOSE.
Pergamum was one of the most prominent cities of 1st Century Asia Minor.
It was an important cultural religious center for a wide variety of pagan cults
including cults to Athena,
to Dionysus,
and to Zeus.
The city itself has long since ceased to exist,
and today there is just a small village called Bergama
located below the ruins of the old city.
The Lord begins His comments to Pergamum
with words of encouragement
and praise:
Rev. 2:12 ¶ "And to the angel of the church in Pergamum write: ¶ The One who has the sharp two-edged sword says this:
Rev. 2:13 ¶ 'I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is; and you hold fast My name, and did not deny My faith even in the days of Antipas, My witness, My faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells.
Christ begins his comments to this group of Christians
by identifying Himself as the One
who has the sword with two edges.
This sword imagery is used a number of times throughout the New Testament.
Just a few verses earlier here in Rev. 1:16
when John first met the risen Christ
he described him by saying
out of His mouth came a sharp two-edged sword;
We will not take the time
to study it all the way through the N.T.,
but let me just say that
the Lord uses this sword imagery
to give us a visual picture
of the power of His Word.
Paul’s comments
in Ephesians 6:17 will help us here.
In that verse
and the passage surrounding it
Paul is encouraging us to prepare effectively for the battle
we Christians are called to fight.
And to help make his point
he calls us to put on the whole armor
that God has provided us with
for that battle.
He talks about the breastplate of righteousness
and the shield of faith
and so on.
But then, in verse 17 he says,
And take the ... sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
I want to say something
that I hope I can express
in a way you will be able to hear.
There is really only one ultimate battle
any of us are called to fight,
and it is a battle that every human being must face.
It is the ongoing battle to trust what God has said to us.
When Adam and Eve introduced sin into the human race
the one battle they fought and lost
was whether or not they would trust
what their Creator had said to them.
God had told them exactly the way things were,
and then said to them in effect, "Trust Me - trust what I have said to you."
When we come to God now,
bringing our sin,
and our failures,
and our fears,
and our helplessness before Him,
what is the one thing
that has the ability to bring us peace
and hope
and assurance of forgiveness?
Choosing to trust what God has said.
1 John 1:9 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Eph. 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;
What we have as Christians
we have for only one reason -
because at certain points in our life
we have heard what God has said
and we have chosen to believe Him.
That one fundamental principle
is the foundation of everything
God seeks to accomplish
for us,
in us,
and through us as His creation.
There are some of you here this morning
who are in tremendous turmoil
because of a raging battle with evil,
with sin that’s taking place at this point in your life.
You pray fervently for more power
to stand strong,
for more strength to defeat the forces
that are seeking to destroy your life.
You firmly believe
that what you need is a greater spiritual energy to conquer the forces
that are seeking to destroy you.
I’m going to say something to you right now
that you will probably not understand,
something that will probably even make you mad,
something that will likely convince you
that I have no idea what you’re going through.
But I’m going to say it anyway,
because its true-
You are fighting the wrong battle.
God did not ask us to fight satan,
He asked us to believe what He, God, has said.
And the battle you are fighting right now
exists not because you don’t have
sufficient spiritual power to drive back the forces of evil that are attacking you,
the battle exists because
you have not yet believed
what God has said to you about your sin,
and because you have not yet believed
what God has said to you about yourself.
You still believe your sin
has the power to meet your needs.
You believe its "wrong",
but you also believe
if you could have it
it would be able to satisfy that need,
that hunger within you.
When God says,
"The wages of sin is death"
you do not hear a voice you trust,
a voice of love,
you hear the voice of divine authority
walling you off from what you believe
you really need.
And you do not yet believe
what God has said to you about yourself.
When God calls you His "Holy One"
you do not believe it.
You still see yourself as a sinner
trying hard to be a little more like a saint.
But that is not what God has said about you.
He says you are a saint,
a holy one of God.
When you turned to Him
with your sin,
and your helplessness,
knowing your only hope
was that He was Good
and that He had made a way
for you to return to Him,
when you trusted Christ’s death
in your place
as full payment for your sin,
at that time
He not only forgave you
and received you into His kingdom,
His family,
but He also recreated you
at the deepest level of your being.
He describes it as placing
a new heart within you,
a new inner man that loves God
and loves righteousness,
and is eternally pure and holy.
That is who you now are in Christ.
That is your true identity.
That is why God begins every conversation He has with you
by calling you His holy one.
The problem, of course,
is that we continue to allow
our self-concept,
our self-identity to be defined
not by what God says about us,
but rather on the basis of our feelings,
and our behavior.
And whoever we believe we are
will ultimately determine how we act.
We enter the family of God
feeling grateful, but inadequate.
We have sinned in the past,
we have built those sin patterns
into our memories,
into our emotions,
and we continue to allow those memories
and those emotions
to define who we still are.
We, therefore, identify ourselves
as "sinners saved by grace".
Because we continue to feel sinful feelings
and commit sinful acts
we continue to see ourselves as sinners
which then perpetuates the sinful behaviors
which reinforces our sinner self-concept, and on and on.
And within that sin cycle
we tell ourselves that
the only way out is to somehow
generate more power
so that we can defeat the sin
and then have a basis for seeing ourselves
as a little less of a sinner.
And then we begin our frantic efforts
to find the "key",
the "secrete",
the "missing piece" to our Christian walk.
There must be some experience,
or some baptism,
or some truth,
or some piece of knowledge
or some seminar
that will empower and equip us
to achieve the victory we hunger for.
And into all of this confusion
our Lord speaks,
and He says in effect,
"My child listen to what I have said about you,
and believe Me.
You are trying so hard to become
what you already are.
I did not ask you to try to become my holy one,
I have told you that you already are My holy one.
2 Cor. 5:17 Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come."
And we respond by saying,
"Look, Lord, I do not feel new,
I do not act new,
therefore I cannot BE new.
I should be new,
and someday I will be new,
but I am not new right now."
And because we are so certain
we are not really yet a new creation
we simply continue living out
the same sin cycles
that dominated our lives
before we came to Christ.
Now we got into this whole discussion
because I was trying to illustrate
that the only real battle we ever fight
is the battle to believe
what God has said.
And nowhere is that more true
than in our battle for practical righteousness
and purity in our lives.
The power of sin is broken in our lives
when we begin to believe what God has told us about ourselves,
and through that belief
recognize that sin is absolutely inconsistent with who we have become through Christ.
Let me show you this
through a passage in one of Paul’s letters.
Q. What was far and away the most sin-ridden church in the New Testament?
The church at Corinth.
The church at Corinth had all sorts of
wrong behaviors going on within the church family.
People were getting drunk.
People were living in open sexual immorality.
People were suing one another.
People were creating all sorts of factions within the church.
Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians to correct these problems.
And the approach he takes
is absolutely amazing.
In I Corinthians 6:9-10 he says:
1 Cor. 6:9 ¶ Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals,
1 Cor. 6:10 nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.
Now those two verses we understand.
He plunges right in
and points out all sorts of wrong, sinful behavior.
And, logically, what would we expect him to say next?
I think we would expect him to say,
"So, if you don’t want to run the risk
of losing your inheritance in the Kingdom of God, you’d better shape it up!"
But do you want to hear what he really says?
In the two verses that follow
Paul reveals God’s powerful 2 step plan
for transforming our lives.
Step #2 is revealed in v. 6:11
1 Cor. 6:11 Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.
Do you see what he’s doing?
He is telling them the truth
about who they really are.
He says before you came to Christ
you were fornicators,
you were idolaters,
you were adulterers,
you were effeminate,
you were homosexuals,
you were thieves,
you were drunkards,
you were swindlers.
It isn’t just what you did,
it was who you were at the core of your being.
But now you are no more.
Now you have become a new creation.
Now, even though your actions still deny it,
you were washed,
you were sanctified,
you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.
You have become a new creation.
And in so doing he calls them
to bring their actions
in line with their true new identity.
But the first great essential step
in the whole transforming process
is that of bringing us to the point
where we hear and believe
what God has said to us.
Sin ultimately looses its power over us
when we can look at it
and say to ourselves,
"That behavior, that response,
that addiction,
that action is completely inconsistent
with who I really am,
God’s holy one,
God’s ambassador,
God’s eternal son."
The real battle is that of hearing
and believing at the heart level
the truth God has told us about ourselves.
Then, the next verse in the Corinthian passage reveals the second step
in God’s program for transformation:
Step #1 is bringing us to the point
where we hear and begin to believe at the heart level what God is telling us
about who we have become in Christ.
Then, step #2 is revealed in the next verse
where Paul says,
1 Cor. 6:12 ¶ All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything.
You see, once we understand who we are
we can finally be honest and objective
about the sinful behaviors that once dominated our lives.
But step #2 can never precede step #1
because apart from understanding our new identity
there is no effective, durable basis for changed behavior.
And then, two, brief final thoughts
to pull this all together.
The first is in the form of an admission
that I misphrased something 2 weeks ago that needs to be corrected.
If you were here,
you may remember I was talking about
the two things that make a church
a truly safe place.
The first of those two things
was a lack of condemnation between us as Christians,
knowing that all of us enter
and remain within the family of God
solely because of the grace of God.
And I mentioned that I had sometimes thought
there would be great value in the body of Christ adopting the pattern of AA
in which each person began their conversation by saying,
"Hi, my name is Larry. I am a sinner,
both against my God
and against my fellow man."
But that’s not a true statement.
What I should have said is this:
"Hi, my name is Larry. I have sinned
both against my God
and against my fellow man.
And it is by His grace alone
that I share with you in the riches
we have in Christ Jesus."
And then, finally,
just to bring this back to where we started,
the two-edged sword that the risen Christ holds is the sword of His Word,
and it has two edges because it cuts both ways.
One edge cuts through the chains and the sins and the bondage that has held His people,
the other edge will ultimately bring His righteous judgement
on those who reject Christ.